Faces Places

The indefatigable Agnès Varda, by this time in her ninth decade and acknowledged as a treasure of world cinema, teams up with the mysterious JR, a thirty-something street artist specialising in large-scale outdoor photographic portraiture in the delightful Faces Places. A docu-travelogue, Varda’s film sees the irresistibly incongruent duo embark on a quest to honour the faces, places, and fast-disappearing traditions of rural France.

Travelling to small communities, towns, and farms in JR’s van, fitted out to resemble a gigantic camera, they immortalise intriguing locals they meet along the way with immense public murals. Among their disparate subjects is the last inhabitant in a row of miners’ cottages that is scheduled for demolition, a postman who was once indispensable to his community, and a trio of dockworkers and their wives.